Introduction:

I served 7 years in the British army, I was deployed to Kosovo in 1999 and to Iraq in 2005.

I started having problems upon return from Kosovo in the form of nightmares, disassociation and terrible anxiety. It felt like I was in a constant dream state which was terrifying because I didn’t know what was happening and didn’t tell anybody. I was 19 years old and this was only the beginning. The anxiety was crippling, what made it worse is that I had to conceal it from my fellow soldiers for fear of being ridiculed. After some months I learned to live with it and just soldier on, not realising the negative impact keeping it bottled up would have in later life.

I left the army in 2003 and seriously struggled to adjust to civilian life, it was probably the worst time of my life. I had planned to leave the army and get married a year later to my fiancée who was to leave the army the following year after I had set up a place to live and for her to have minimal issues when she left. But that never happened. We split up a few weeks after I left and was absolutely heartbroken. Things started to spiral, the depression, anxiety and then the alcoholism started. I was working for agencies, driving HGV wagons, hating what I was doing and using alcohol as a release at weekends, getting so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing, and suffering the next day. That carried on for over 2 years.

In March 2005 I’d had enough, I phoned the army records office in Glasgow and volunteered to be called up for active service as I was still on the reserve list. There were two conflicts occurring at that time, Iraq and Afghanistan. I wasn’t bothered which I was given and eventually they offered me Iraq. I’d felt out in the cold for the past 2 years on civvi Street and this was an opportunity felt I couldn’t miss.

After some refresher training at Chilwell in Nottingham I was deployed to Basrah Air Station in southern Iraq. My parents were mortified to say the least, especially my mother, as my brother nearly lost his life in Northern Ireland in the late 80’s, but when you want to do something so badly, you don’t really care about what other people think.

2005 was the bloodiest year for British soldiers in Iraq, every other day a snatch land rover would be blown up on the routes we used every day, killing and seriously wounding soldiers, my unit would run the IED gauntlet every day, driving in convoy to Kuwait and driving back escorting aircraft fuel tankers back to Basrah Air Station. Everyday was a lottery.

I returned to the UK after 6 months, debriefed, demobilised and happy to be alive. What I didn’t realise is that I had to start all over again, but this time I was older and wiser than I was in 2003. After the tour was finished, I said to myself, “Never again”, that was it for me militarily, not realising my personal war was only going to get worse.

Anxiety was background noise at that point, being left untreated it was getting louder week after week, month after month. Still struggling to find work, my problems were being compounded. The nightmares and intrusive thoughts were increasing in severity, the alcoholism was picking up pace and I was starting to spiral again. I was an angry man with no outlet and no perceived way of dealing with these issues.